


if winter ends

by Aris



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Growing Up Together, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Slow To Update, Trans Character, Trans Kuroo Tetsurou, Transphobia, u know what.......
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 13:43:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: Kenma trips onto his bed deliberately when they arrive, falls onto the cool covers and presses his face against the sheets. They dent around him, the shaded green throwing out the paler skin in stark relief. Kuroo tucks away the flush, the blurry dye of pink and red that sprinkles gradually outwards from Kenmas knuckles, knees, ankles. It’s like pink ice cream, the pallid coloured one he thinks might be strawberry flavoured, or maybe raspberry.Sweet, or maybe sour.





	if winter ends

**Author's Note:**

> hey pals i shouldnt be posting this because im in the middle of exams and i dont have the next chapter even vaguely started but i saw it in my drafts and. i missed my best boy kuroo 
> 
> and im......sorry about the weird way kuroo comes out to his mum. i watched atla recently . it's not realistic but God i wish i came out that way like a real arty bitch. i think about how things could have gone better a lot /sorry for the unreal amount of growing up trans fics im writing recently 
> 
> *** dont read this lol. im gunna re write it it's so awful im sorry

Kuroo has never been the biggest fan of hot weather.

It’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy it, because that wouldn’t be true at all. There’s a fever to spring, summer, that lifts shadowy weights from his shoulders that winter had brought down heavily; in its place a persistent light, warm on exposed skin and blooming florals in every crack of pavement and scrap of dirt. He loves that flowers command that, take root at the top of street lights and in bricked-over drains, straining themselves up all alone to brush up against a few stray beams of sunlight that filter into their suburban home.

He used to pick at the petals of flowers when he was younger, resting with Kenma in parks. The shade cast by trees above them would bring a chill to his knees, but it would always be refreshing in comparison to the sweat he worked up jumping high enough to spike over the public volleyball net. It had been bigger than the ones in the playground, but he was tall for his age and with Kenma setting he was unstoppable, childish enthusiasm launching the tips of fingers through the air. A care-free joy bringing him to smile over every hit net and spiked set alike. And then, temporarily tired, he would lie among the flowers, listening peacefully to the light pings of Kenma’s newest handheld game, scattering floral carnage over Kenma’s dipped back. 

The fresh stickiness of burst phloem could stay with him for the rest of the day, through hand washes and meals and artificially scented crayons. At night, he’d scent grass and flowers, and hold that little moment of tranquility close to his chest, wishing it would wash into his dreams before the angry murmur from below his room tainted them.

Now, older and bigger, he steps around crushed flowers, scoops up drooping plants to deposit in safer areas, quietly waters the wild varieties that build up at the steps of his back door. He refuses to destroy a being weaker than him, will not harm something merely because he can. There’s a certain enchanting quality to the green of plant stems, the vibrancy of blooms, and he learns from books and journals that no one quite knows how trees can suck water up high enough to reach their tallest leaves. He taps the bark of trees he walks by, thinks about adhesion and cohesion and how trees bleed sap, how every childish forage into their woody skin forced vulnerability onto cherry blossoms and Katsuras. He regrets.

Kenma likes to call him a nerd, childish and with an amused slope to his lips, but Kuroo knows he words it the best way possible. The softest meaning. It’s how Kenma is beneath his relative quietness, where he is not dry and sharp, he is sweet and careful. So precise with his niceness, his chosen compliments and comments that it drives a molten vulnerability straight through Kuroo’s core.

He likes this warmth the same way he likes the warmth of spring, the warmth of reds and yellows and oranges blossoming from crumbling cement. This is the element of hot weather he can enjoy, appreciate, and that is only slightly detracted from by the _sweltering hell inferno_ that is Tokyo in full blown summer.

“Kuroo,” Kenma prompts from besides him, interrupting his thoughts and apparently having been the one paying attention for once, “It’s hot,” He side-eyes his friend, propped up against the bench besides him, a strip of sun chasing away the shadows they’d sought out for shelter. The blond has shrugged his cardigan down to his elbows, the baggy material flaring out around his legs, and there’s a sheen to his forehead that suggests he’d had quite enough of Kuroo’s bright ‘ _let’s go outside_ ’ idea.

Kuroo stands, stretching out his own legs in a cat-like imitation that fails to garner much attention, and Kenma follows sedately, hand wrapped around his PSP and one earphone trailing down near his hips. There’s something pleasing about Kenma’s casual messiness, and he can’t help catching his eyes on the tight lines of denim jeans, the straying threads protruding from beneath his cardigan paws. Kenma is comfortable in himself when tucked away in the confines of a game. Too distracted to be mindful. Kuroo envies it.

“Yeah. You’ve gotten enough vitamin D, you might not die of rickets tomorrow,” His friend wrinkles his nose at him, “Let’s go home,” he continues, smiling at cute crinkles on Kenma’s forehead. Underneath his breath, Kenma mutters something, likely an endearment dressed up as an insult, and it takes a concentrated effort for Kuroo’s chest not to burst with affection. He supposes, the only thing keeping him together when there's too much inside, is the binder pressed against each curve of rib. A reminder where his breath fails to catch. A comfort, when his shirt slides down a straight plain. It brings him to reality, again and again and again.

They walk back in an amiable silence and the heat ramps up a notch away from the patchy shade of the parks trees. Kuroo’s skin feels sticky with sweat, but he refuses to remove his jacket in the lazy streets around his home. There’s something to be said about the dragging eyes of his neighbours – they talk, in this little community, and he’s stirred up enough gossip in his time here he’s reluctant to show the smallest sign of weakness – which what would taking off his jacket would be. It doesn’t quite make sense, but he supposes these don't always. He's painfully conscious of his body with every moment, and the way his jacket overlaps over his chest in an ambiguous bagginess is comforting. A second skin, as if a protective barrier between him and the rest of the world.

When they get to Kenma’s, it’s the first thing he takes off.

Kenma trips onto his bed deliberately when they arrive, falls onto the cool covers and presses his face against the sheets. They dent around him, the shaded green throwing out the paler skin in stark relief. Kuroo tucks away the flush, the blurry dye of pink and red that sprinkles gradually outwards from Kenmas knuckles, knees, ankles. It’s like pink ice cream, the pallid coloured one he thinks might be strawberry flavoured, or maybe raspberry. Sweet or sour.

Kenma looks up at him, then, hair frizzy with static from his landing and eyes glazed with heat, shirt pulled down a little low to reveal a glimmering collarbone and the suggestions of more below it.

Definitely sweet.

 

* * *

 

He first cut his hair short at the age of nine. His father is around, then, drinking in the kitchen with a friend or two from work while Kuroo and his mother watch a film on a volume a tick away from silence. Subtitles dance along the screen in a fuzzy white that sometimes blurs into the longer shots of the sky, and his eyes ache from straining to catch them. He misses whole portions of visual scenes, squinting hard from the floor and hoping to catch the tail end of a shouted sentence from a particularly loud character.

Kuroo had asked if it was okay to turn it up, but his mother had just told him sorry. He doesn’t understand fully what that means yet, and he stays quiet in response because the love interest is talking. She crouches at a river, stops her monologue and looks off into the fields below - her past home, somewhere she must flee from - music swells, the camera takes on a dreamy quality, and she presses a blade to the top of her braid.

It’s laying on the shore, tail end swaying with the current, when Kuroo asks:

“Why did she cut it off?”

“She’s no longer who she used to be. She’s leaving her old life behind,” And his mother smiles, a little sadly, and turns back to her book. She looks tired, worn down, if Kuroo really looks closely. He tries not to. His father laughs from the kitchen. Bottles clink together.

That night, he takes the scissors from the bathroom cupboard and cuts off both his pigtails. They’re scissors for bandages, and they cut too straight and catch on the rubber inside his hairbands. He cuts his fingers untangling it, and when his mother catches him there’s blood swirling in the sink, hairs catching in the drain.

Her hands are shaking when she takes the scissors from him and checks over his neck and face for any wounds. Fussy and close and the bathroom is humid from a shower, cut hairs flecking his face and arms. She asks why, lips pale and eyes searching, what he’s doing, and Kuroo tells her, arrogantly, selfishly;

_I want to change, mum._

She hugs him so hard he thinks he won’t be able to breathe again, and his father looks like he wishes that were true when he finds out, eventually.

(That night’s the first he pulls a pillow over his head to block out the arguing.

It’s not the last.)

 

* * *

 

At first, he falls in love very, very slowly.

He gets wrapped up inside himself. He’s small still, here, and he stamps on grass verges in frustration. He throws stones into rivers, tries to catch flies with snapping hands intended to kill - he learns, from those close to him, how to hurt.  His father shows him what it is to ache from the skin, his mother hides from him what it is to ache inside. These are lessons he ingrains, smashes in between grasped hands too small to fit comfortably in those big, big scissors.

When his father is loud, and his mother is being very quiet, he stays inside his head, where it is neither. And he keeps himself there when possible, in school breaks with crumbs on skirts, in sports classes being picked for teams as the tallest, sitting on his doorstep hoping his mother will come home early. There’s nothing to hurt him besides himself.

Kenma is a constant. His mother is kind, but wary of letting Kuroo round too often; the result is the two of them shuffled close on the curb, in the park, crowded over a game. Kuroo still in his uniform, Kenma dressed down. He treasures it a lot, these times together in the sun and snow.

He grows up clinging to them. His father leaves, someplace between Kuroo’s new uniform and the divorce, and Kuroo curls up inside. There’s homework, and volleyball, and Kuroo keeps his hair short and ambiguous, playing at his ears. None of his casual clothes are feminine, and his mother never says another word about it - she calls him Tetsu, endearments, nothing than could indicate gender; he never knows what she says to others, because there are never others. They haven’t talked about it since his father left - he’s not sure what he’d say. How he’d start an apology that big.

This is what it is to be within oneself; he is captain of the girls volleyball team, and he gets along well enough with the team, is suitably close when he needs to be. He’s aware he’s a little off, a little different, but he was taught confidence from a man who wore arrogance as a second skin - he knows how to be a girl, he knows how to be in charge.

He questions why being a girl feels more like a role he must fill rather than something he slips to from his dreams every morning, melting flawlessly into a human mold. But his mother is less quiet, now, smiles like there’s something worth smiling for, bursts through the house like a fire, sometimes. He doesn’t know how to tell her. He doesn’t know how to tell himself, can’t stop to think about it between his homework and his practice, fills the spaces in between with Kenmas button clicking, a sharp word or two, strange, straight forward questions.

He wears out the clock showing Kenma textbooks, reading at his side, tossing a ball back and forth in the park, their back gardens. They cook together, quaint things when their parents don’t mind the mess, and there’s a quality of peacefulness in caring for someone other than himself, a hue soft and significant.  It’s intrinsically more pleasing victories in games, than seeing someone he had tutored improved, than the pride and trust his team have in him, the close bonds they share hand to hand. It’s heady, and cloying, and when he buries his face in Kenma’s shoulder he doesn’t have to stay in his head.

He can just _be._

So, he falls in love very, very slowly for seventeen years, and then all at once.

(Because he’d busy, putting it all together. Building himself upon a shaky foundation, sewing wounds closed and counting the seconds till he fell; busy, and he's not quite sure of the truth in it.)

**Author's Note:**

> not my best piece for sure but please be gentle if you're kind enough to leave a comment . thanks 4 seeing me through!
> 
> for clarification sake there's a lot of time skips . i have no concept of linear plot
> 
>  
> 
> title; [if winter ends - birght eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Dc1xley3A)  
> chapter title; [pine tree lines - told slant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAd7gaYOtA)
> 
>  
> 
> [writing tumblr](http://ariswrites.tumblr.com)


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